AnnMaria

This category is for posts written by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars.

Throwback Thursday: The Opposite of Lazy Isn’t Disciplined

December 22, 2017 in 7GenGames / AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday tagged 7 Generation Games / AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday by Diana Sanchez

In Spanish: When are we? Where are we ? — Life is sweet. After months of revisions, translations and testing, Aztech: Meet the Maya will be submitted to the app store by the time I get done drinking this martini. Champagne would be more appropriate but it was after midnight when we made the last mandatory change and all the […]

Eating my own dog food: Learning Spanish from a game

December 21, 2017 in AnnMaria / Dog food / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

Characters on snow background — I’ll confess right up front that I’m not as organized as I’d like to be when it comes to game design or, well, anything. However, let’s pretend I was. In that case, I’d start out by considering what assets I need for the Caves and Ladders game I discussed in […]

Game Design Basics: Assets

December 21, 2017 in AnnMaria / Code Talk / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

Game Background — As you may have heard, I will be heading to Santiago in about a month to be part of Startup Chile, where I’ll be expanding our line of bilingual games for the Latin American market. First on the agenda is to do a Latin American version of Making Camp. The […]

Designing my way to Chile, Part 1

December 20, 2017 in AnnMaria / Code Talk / Educational Games by AnnMaria De Mars

Mountains in Chile — For the tl;dr crowd, this post has two lessons: Never underestimate your own influence. Never miss an opportunity to learn from anyone you meet. This whole journey that ends with me in Santiago, Chile, started with a conversation with a teacher from a small school in Missouri. I had a […]

How Listening to a Teacher from Missouri Led Me to ...

December 17, 2017 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries / Women in Tech by AnnMaria De Mars

Going through our archives, we came across this great post by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars from October 20, 2016 “Seeing Further Down the Road: Why Your Parents Think Different From You” that we wanted to share in case you missed it the first time around. At the National Indian Education Association […]

Throwback Thursday – Seeing Further Down the Road: Why Your ...

December 14, 2017 in 7GenGames / AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday tagged 7 Generation Games / AnnMaria / Throwback Thursday by Diana Sanchez

Learning Statistics with Graphs

December 9, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Resources by AnnMaria De Mars

cards with prompts — Whether it is teaching statistics, software design or writing, I think you need to remember that everything is easier once you’ve done it a bunch of times. I was talking to a couple of teachers I know about the software design project we are doing with a couple of local […]

Teaching Software Design with Writing Prompts

December 5, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Educational Resources / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

Girl about to set off on path — As you know, if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been meeting the past few weeks with high school students helping to improve the design of our games. Today, I asked students to submit cards with answers to prompts. They played Crossroads, a decision-making game that is still in prototype, Fish […]

Student design team results, continued

December 2, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

Angie, from Forgotten Trail — Part of making a good game is having believable characters, whether it is Mario, Zelda or the dwarf-hunter in World of Warcraft. If you had watched our Characters Behind the Characters video, you’d know that the voice of Angie is my daughter, Julia De Mars, and the “look” is a […]

Meet Angie: Character development in Forgotten Trail

November 28, 2017 in AnnMaria / Education: Innovation and STEM / Educational Games / Game Progress by AnnMaria De Mars

If you follow this blog somewhat regularly, you may know that we started a software design project with a couple of alternative schools. How is that going? Thanks for asking. It’s going pretty well. The students have come up with a lot of specific suggestions, not just for improving game […]

Game Suggestions from Student Design Teams

November 27, 2017 in AnnMaria / Educational Games / New earth by AnnMaria De Mars

I am sure that I should be writing a post to tell you all to buy our games, that it is Black Friday , Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday or whatever and your grandma doesn’t need another half-dozen coffee cups. For God’s sake , the woman has been on this […]

Simple hover effect without JavaScript

November 26, 2017 in AnnMaria / Code Talk by AnnMaria De Mars

Games That Make You Smarter